Most people who need something just go to the store to get the item, but a number of people take the time and effort to handcraft their own stuff. They do that because they enjoy tinkering with things until they work just the way they like them. Well, Custom Search has a group of developers who are like that, and they want to create and share their tools.

For such developers, we have good news. We launched a new API that lets other services connect to Custom Search. You can programmatically create, update, and delete search engines without going through the Custom Search control panel. In fact, the API offers most of the functionality that the Custom Search platform provides, and we're working on supporting the rest.

If you provide a service such as hosting websites or blogs, you can partner with Google to create custom search engines for your users. You can use the API to integrate Custom Search into your management console. Your users can then create search engines using your service and will need to use the Custom Search control panel only if they want to be more involved in the customization of their search engines. In our previous blog entry, we talked about how several web hosting providers have already done this. (If you are a web hosting provider who wants to integrate search into the sites you host, please ping us.)

Even if you are not providing a service for a large set of users, you could still create a lot of cool things with the API. Here are a few ideas: If you have a list of websites that change frequently, you can automate the updating of your annotations file; if you have a content management system, you could create search for all your webpages and even create search labels based on your existing categories; if you are a blogging platform, you can enable search for all your blogs.